Happy Birthday: Mac OS X Turns Nine

By Bryan Chaffin

Mar 24th, 2010 2:48 PM EDT

It seems appropriate to us to offer Mac OS X a birthday shoutout, as it was on this day in 2001 that Apple officially shipped Mac OS X 10.0. After a multi-month public beta, Apple released the final version on a Saturday, with small-scale events at its CompUSA Stores-within-a-Store.

Remember CompUSA? That company is gone, but it served as a testing ground for what would eventually become Apple’s own fleet of Apple Store retail locations, where product launches regularly include special events.

Mac OS X was built off of NeXTSTEP, the operating system developed by NeXT, the company Steve Jobs founded after being ousted from Apple. When then-Apple CEO Gil Amelio bought NeXT in order to get a foundation for a next-generation OS to replace the original Mac OS (then at OS 9), he also got Steve Jobs as an advisor, which eventually led to Mr. Amelio’s own ouster and replacement by Steve Jobs.

Several years of development later, Apple released a Mac OS X Public Beta for US$29.95 in September of 2000. As mentioned above, that was followed by the release of Mac OS X 10.0 on March 24th, 2001, which makes our favorite operating system nine years old.